Presidential Inaugurations

Dates Covered: 1789 - 2001
ISBN: 015100546X
HH Rating:

Our Take

Vice President-elect Andrew Johnson was feeling under the weather in 1865, on the eve of his second inauguration. While that particular event would become famous for the utterance of President-elect Lincoln's second inaugural address [that speech now adorns the x monument], Johnson himself had been suffering from typhoid fever and wasn't doing well. It was the nineteenth century, which means that he took a few shots of brandy before the ceremony to fortify himself. Unfortunately, this had the side effect of making him drunk, and when it came time to swear him in, Johnson rambled on interminably and embarrassed everyone. The Senate clerk, for example, loudly shushed him; everyone present fidgeted awkwardly, waiting for his boisterous speech about pride and duty and service to end. It was bad enough that Lincoln had to defend his Vice President a few days later: "I have known Andy for many years," he said, "He made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared. Andy ain't a drunkard."

Such snippets pepper Paul F. Boller Jr.'s new book, Presidential Inaugurations: Behind the Scenes - An Informal, Anecdotal History from Washington's Election to George W. Bush's Gala. Boller notes that inaugurations have historically reflected their participants, and follows a set of precedents established by Washington and altered or maintained over the course of many generations. Not unlike today's modern Olympics, the inauguration has a fairly ridiculous number of components, and Boller investigates many of them. For example, in the days before air travel, President-elects had to slog their way across the country by land if they weren't living in Washington already. Word got around, and great thronging crowds waited for them at every turn, frequently but not always with good intentions. For example, not only did he have to contend with his Vice President, but in 1860 the beleaguered Abraham Lincoln had to sneak through Baltimore, a city with such animosity for the President-elect that it wouldn't even guarantee him police protection during his stay.

While such details go a long way in humanizing some of America's leaders, Boller goes out of his way to be all-inclusive on a broad topic. He illuminates the details of what happens when an inauguration falls on a Sunday by recounting every other time it's happened whether they're interesting or not. For the most part, large sections of the book go this way: there is an entire chapter devoted to the morning procession to the inauguration. Another chapter extensively, and exclusively, addresses the weather on variation inaugural days. These sorts of chapters are festooned with anecdotes, and some of them not half bad. There is, for example, the unintentionally funny song sung to Washington set to the tune of "God Save the King". A British visitor was appalled at the "brutal familiarity" with which the public conducted itself in regards to President-elect Jackson. "There was not a hulking boy from a keel-boat who was not introduced to the president," she wrote, "unless, indeed, as was the case with some, they introduced themselves." Careful observers will recall that Jackson's own inauguration was one of the most infamous; as Boller himself writes, "... men were getting into fistfights over the refreshments and, in the process, breaking china, tearing down draperies, and dumping food all over."

His is a book of little anecdotes. Perhaps this is best illustrated by the last chapter, entitled "Inaugural Vignettes", which is pretty much what it sounds like. No vignette is longer than four paragraphs; many are one, and Boller makes an effort to produce at least one from each inauguration, leading up to the most recent [i.e., George W. Bush]. For intellectual finger food, this is a corking format, because it provides a narrative not long enough to outlast your bathroom visit or the short attention span of your fellow cocktail party attendees in the Hamptons. However, this means that you can't get much detail out of what really happened that day, especially with regards to the Presidential characters involved. In some ways, it starts to feel a little like a joke book , where the rabbis and Irishmen are replaced with sturdy nineteenth-century Presidents. This is not to say it's bad - but the little stories aren't much more than that. During the ball of Ulysses Grant's first inauguration, for example, the night was so cold that canaries brought to enliven the dance froze to death quietly in their cages.

We laughed. But that could have happened to anybody. What made us much more interested - and what is rare to find in this book's covers - were the anecdotes that really shook with the trappings, political and social, of a different age. At Buchanan's inauguration in 1857, the country with seething with social unrest over slavery. Indeed, he'd tried to placate everybody by dancing around the topic with his speech. That evening, at the ball, Russian minister Baron de Stoeckl remarked to the French minister's wife that this particular ball felt just like the ball he'd attended in Paris in 1830, that is to say, just before the Revolution of 1830. At that ball, Talleyrand, minion of future French king Louis Philippe, quietly remarked to his boss, "Sire, we are dancing on a volcano."

Of course, Louis Philippe ended up being installed as king and made it nearly twenty years, a far cry from what happened in the US. But, let's face it, balls aren't always a ball. As for Boller himself, he's not bad - but he's no ball, either.

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